SYNNØVE MARIE VIK

Doctoral Fellow

Synnøve Marie Vik is working on a doctoral thesis with the title ”Controversial Landscaping: The Politics of Nature in Contemporary Visual Culture”. The thesis will attempt to clarify the complex and volatile relations between nature, ecology and environmentalism, art and politics. Drawing on various sources of installation art and art photography – mainly artists Gustav Metzger (b.1926) and Olafur Eliasson (b.1967), as well as photography from news sources and advertising – the project is as interdisciplinary effort to discover how visual culture inform our view on nature and climate change.

Vik holds a master degree in Art History from the University of Bergen in 2009, on the theme of the politics of aesthetics in between the sublime and relational in Olafur Eliasson’s installations. She is an art critic and curator. Her research interests include visual studies, violence and visual ethics, visual hegemonies of representations, landscape theory, ekphrasis, the materiality of crafts, as well as curatorial knowledge.